Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer (AI Agent)

Cresta; United States; Remote; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical insurance

Dental insurance

Vision insurance

Paid parental leave

Health & Wellness allowance

Remote work stipend

Lunch reimbursement

Job summary

Cresta is hiring a Machine Learning Engineer to advance next-generation AI Agents and Agentic Assist systems. You will work across high-impact AI initiatives with placement based on strengths and business needs.

The role focuses on building agentic AI, evaluating robustness of LLM-powered systems, and scaling pipelines for real-time enterprise data. Remote-friendly, US/Canada hiring, competitive compensation and benefits.

Qualifications

• 5–8+ years in industry building and deploying ML systems in production.
• Significant experience with LLMs and NLP techniques.
• Strong knowledge of modern ML frameworks and cloud infrastructure.
• Experience designing and deploying RAG systems in enterprise environments.
• Ability to lead cross-functional technical decisions.

Responsibilities

• Lead design and development of AI Agents and Agentic Assist systems.
• Architect multi-step workflows combining guidance, retrieval, reasoning and automation.
• Design, deploy and optimize LLM-powered systems including RAG pipelines.
• Improve reasoning, planning and tool-use in real-world AI apps.
• Develop evaluation strategies and measure quality metrics.
• Mentor engineers and influence the technical roadmap.

Skills

LLMs

NLP

Retrieval-Augmented Generation

RAG pipelines

Multi-agent workflows

PyTorch

TensorFlow

Hugging Face

Cloud infrastructure

Technical leadership

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Master's or Ph.D. preferred

Tools

PyTorch

TensorFlow

Hugging Face

Job description

Cresta unlocks the true potential of the customer experience, turning every conversation into a competitive advantage. Cresta’s unified AI platform combines conversational AI agents, real-time human agent augmentation, and comprehensive conversation intelligence to drive revenue and efficiency gains across every channel. The world’s leading companies, including United Airlines, Cox Communications, and Marriott, use Cresta to power world-class customer experiences every day.

Born from the Stanford AI Lab, Cresta has raised more than $270 million from the world’s leading investors, including a16z, Greylock, and Sequoia. Cresta’s leadership includes some of the leading minds in AI today. Our CEO, Ping Wu , founded and led Google’s Contact Center AI and Vertex AI platforms before joining Cresta to build the future of AI-driven customer experiences.

Over the next few years, AI is going to redefine how people all over the world interact with businesses every day. Come build that future at Cresta.

About the role:

Machine Learning Engineers at Cresta work across several high-impact AI initiatives. Final team placement is determined based on experience, strengths, and business needs.

Current focus areas include:

• Agentic Assist:Lead and build next-generation agentic AI systems that augment contact center agents in real time. This track requires strong pre-LLM ML foundations, deep expertise in LLMs and modern prompting techniques, a rapid prototyping mindset, and a proven ability to translate cutting-edge research into scalable, production-grade systems.
• Agent & System Quality:Design evaluation frameworks and improve the reliability, robustness, and performance of LLM-powered agents. This includes diagnosing and mitigating failure modes such as hallucinations, retrieval errors, tool misuse, context drift, prompt brittleness, and multi-step reasoning breakdowns, while defining measurable quality metrics (e.g., accuracy, faithfulness, task completion, latency, and cost) for complex, non-deterministic systems.
• Insights:Architect and scale LLM and retrieval-augmented generation pipelines that ground models in enterprise data. This track focuses on building high-performance ML systems that process complex data, extract structured insights, and deliver real-time, actionable intelligence at scale.

Responsibilities:

• Lead the design and development of Cresta’s next-generation AI Agents and Agentic Assist systems, defining system architecture and core modeling approaches.
• Architect intelligent, multi-step agent workflows that combine real-time guidance, knowledge retrieval, reasoning, summarization, and automated actions into cohesive production systems.
• Design, deploy, and optimize LLM-powered systems, including Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines, multi-agent orchestration, and domain-adapted models.
• Improve reasoning, planning, and tool-use capabilities in real-world AI applications.
• Develop evaluation strategies for complex, non-deterministic systems, including offline benchmarking, online experimentation, and LLM-as-a-judge methodologies.
• Diagnose and mitigate real-world failure modes such as hallucinations, retrieval errors, tool misuse, prompt brittleness, and multi-step reasoning breakdowns.
• Define and measure quality metrics (e.g., accuracy, faithfulness, task completion, latency, cost, robustness) to improve system reliability and performance.
• Optimize AI systems for scalability, latency, security, and cost efficiency in production environments.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with product, frontend, and backend teams to integrate AI capabilities seamlessly into Cresta’s platform.
• Mentor engineers, contribute to technical strategy, and help shape the roadmap for Creta’s AI systems.

Qualifications We Value:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, or a related field; Master’s or Ph.D. preferred.
• 5–8+ years of industry experience building and deploying machine learning systems in production, including significant experience working with LLMs.
• Strong expertise in NLP, Generative AI, transformer architectures, embeddings, and retrieval systems.
• Proven experience designing and deploying Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems in enterprise environments.
• Experience building and evaluating complex agentic or multi-step LLM workflows.
• Strong knowledge of modern ML frameworks and tools (e.g., PyTorch, TensorFlow, Hugging Face) and distributed/cloud-based infrastructure.
• Demonstrated ability to optimize real-time ML systems for performance, scalability, and reliability.
• Strong technical leadership skills, with the ability to influence cross-functional decisions and raise the engineering bar.
• We offer Cresta employees a variety of medical, dental, and vision plans, designed to fit you and your family’s needs
• Paid parental leave to support you and your family
• Monthly Health & Wellness allowance

Work from home office stipend to help you succeed in a remote environment

Lunch reimbursement for in-office employees

PTO: 3 weeks in Canada

Compensation for this position includes a base salary, equity, and a variety of benefits. Actual base salaries will be based on candidate-specific factors, including experience, skillset, and location, and local minimum pay requirements as applicable. We are actively hiring for this role in the US and Canada. This posting will be used to fill a newly-created role.